I believe that the article is overestimating how hard it will be to reverse engineer the save game code and is fallaciously assuming that crackers will need to

I believe that the article is overestimating how hard it will be to reverse engineer the save game code and is fallaciously assuming that crackers will need to maintain a public facing internet server for people to use. a) You don't need to maintain a public facing save game server -- you simply need to have a local server running at localhost:31337. A successful crack will have this running transparently as you run the game. b) Many companies entire purpose is to provide "uncrackable" DRM. AFAIK, all of these companies' solutions have failed. Often before the games even publicly ship. I mean, at the very least, a script kiddie will naively crack the protocol and manually generate save files from each of the levels, so that you can play the game one area at a time. I am confident that it will be properly cracked though. Or as someone else on HN mentioned: you could ship the crack with a light virtual machine and just save states of the entire VM. There is a huge incentive to crack the game, both monetarily for pirates who will be reselling the game, as well as for the huge prestige for cracking groups. I am not aware of any high-profile game that has not been cracked within a week of release, if not days.